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Sunday, June 26, 2016

Blocking the Ad Assault

It’s not clutter, click bait, or relevancy that drives
ad-blockers. It’s the intrusive assault on attention and hijacking of computer
resources that pisses people off. Pop-up, whether banners, windows, videos, or
any other unwanted automatic activated ad is directly invasive. It is force
that like torture, achieves the opposite intended effect driving people away
rather than planting an interest or curiosity that will lead to purchase. The
pop-up may be the most relevant valuable information but if I wasn’t looking
for it or intending to access it, it is an annoying distraction. Don’t sell me
anything while I’m eating supper. Don’t sit on top of my computer with a
megaphone. This is attention spam, not ads, harassment not persuasion. I’m fine
with paying for content through ads and data collection, but ads should be
essentially passive, drawing you to them, not actively jumping up and down in
front of you blocking out all else. Ad blocks shouldn’t be necessary. Right now
we’re stuck using one type of predator to scare away another. An ads success shouldn’t be clicks. The most
successful ones don’t immediately get me to click. They get me to do so much later
or just consider the ad when making a purchase.You don’t cut through information clutter by yelling louder, that just
generates more clutter. Feed the most beautiful
music not a cacophony and it just becomes more noise. They are trying to solve
the wrong problem. You have to reduce the noise so people stop tuning it all
out.And unwanted music is always noise.

When the grandees of the global advertising industry met in the
south of France earlier this week for the annual Cannes Lions
International Festival of Creativity, they had much to feel good about.
Global ad spending is expected to reach $600 billion US by the end of
next year, according to eMarketer, and grow at an annual rate of about
five per cent until the end of the decade. Much of that growth is being
fuelled by digital advertising, particularly on mobile devices.
But there was one session in Cannes where some very dark clouds
managed to intrude on the sunny forecast. It was a panel devoted to the
current scourge of the digital advertising industry — ad blocking.

Given the option to do the right thing or the free thing...consumers will always choose the free thing.- Jess Greenwood

According to a report by PageFair and Adobe, more than 200 million
people worldwide have downloaded software that can block virtually all
online advertising.
The number of people blocking ads increased by more than 40 per cent
last year, and it is estimated that blocking cost cash-starved
publishers more than $22 billion last year.
So it's not surprising that just about any time advertisers and
publishers get together these days, the question of what to do about ad
blocking is usually high on the agenda.
The panel at Cannes was hosted by Randall Rothenberg, CEO of the
Interactive Advertising Bureau, who has made no secret of his contempt
for ad blockers.
At an IAB meeting in January, he described ad blocking as "an
old-fashioned extortion racket, gussied up in the flowery but false
language of contemporary consumerism."

The number of people blocking ads increased by more than 40 per cent last year.

White lists

The source of the ad industry's outrage is the ad blockers' practice
of "white listing." Publishers and advertisers can pay an ad blocking
company to have their ads appear on a user's page, even if the user has
paid to have ads blocked.
The ad blockers defend the practice by arguing they only allow ads
they deem to be "acceptable," but Kate Kaye, who writes about digital
marketing for AdAge, isn't buying it.
"If I'm a consumer and I've downloaded that thing I might be a little
bit off-put by the fact that someone can pay to have the technology
that I downloaded actually not work," Kaye said in a recent interview.
"I think it's analogous somewhat to mafia protection pay. It's like
we're going to create a threat and then we're going to ask you to pay us
to not threaten you."
Almost everyone in the ad industry acknowledges that most of the
wounds that have led to the rise in ad blocking are self-inflicted.
Advertisers got greedy by assaulting users with too many low quality,
untargeted ads, too many auto play videos, too much click bait.
Last fall, the IAB launched an initiative called L.E.A.N. Ads (light, encrypted, ad choice supported, non-invasive).
The IAB hopes that by following the L.E.A.N. guidelines, advertisers will create ads that consumers will be happy to see.

Playing hardball

But improving the user experience is not the only weapon in the
arsenal. Some high-end publishers are playing hardball with readers who
have installed ad blockers.
Sites like Forbes and GQ won't allow access to their content unless
users turn them off. At Cannes, Mark Thompson, the president and CEO of
the New York Times, announced that his newspaper would soon be offering
an ad-free edition to subscribers at a premium price.
Other publishers are appealing to their readers' sense of fairness
and justice, asking them to turn off their blockers and reminding them
they are a critical part of the ecosystem that has powered the internet
for the past 20 years. Without ads, there would be no free content
online.
But Jess Greenwood of the New York ad agency R/GA doubts the effectiveness of appealing to users' better nature.
"Given the option to do the right thing or the free thing," Greenwood
told the panel at Cannes, "consumers will always choose the free
thing."

Johnny Ryan, author of The History of the
Internet and the Digital Future, argues that the web is more fragile
than we think — and that if we don't support it, it may disappear.
(EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/Getty Images)

Native advertising

But the most effective strategy to counter the ad blocking surge might be to produce ads that don't look like ads at all.
So-called "native advertising" has been growing in popularity over
the past several years. Also known as "sponsored content," it looks and
feels like editorial content, but it comes from advertisers rather than
journalists.
Native advertisements can often pass through ad blocking filters
because the filters don't recognize it as advertising. Many readers
seem to be prefer this kind of content over traditional advertising,
provided it's properly labeled, although there's no consensus on what
constitutes proper labeling.

"The web can go"

But the real victims of the ad blocking surge may not be advertisers and publishers, but the "free" web itself.
The money to pay for content has to come from somewhere, and if you
take advertising revenue out of the equation, readers will have to pick
up the slack themselves, something they have historically been reluctant
to do. Without ads, the web may be a poorer and less interesting
place.
It's hard to blame anyone for wanting to opt out of the increasingly
unpleasant experience of surfing an over-commercialized web, the
consequences of those actions have perhaps not been fully realized.
"Things like the web can go," argues Johnny Ryan, author of the book, The History of the Internet and the Digital Future.
"It came from somewhere. It's a fragile thing. It's supported by
advertising and if we don't fix it, it won't be around for that much
longer."Click the button above to hear Ira Basen's documentary, "Skip This Ad."

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About Me

The Pündi are a race from my fantasy novels, the Continuum Chronicles, an exploration of spiritual evolution theory. Appearing like us, they are really child-sized aliens cursed by their own intelligence, trapped as observers unable to share their knowledge. They often develop an individual obsessive interest.

I write and publish, not selling anything, just trying to share ideas that might profit everyone. I aim not for originality but creativity, organizing what exists to generate new associations. I'm a writer with thick glasses and autism, familiar with the struggle for clarity. Novelist, researcher, internet activist, spiritual evolutionist, and process philosopher, I believe in democratic social capitalism with a well-regulated engine of sustainable markets. As a writer, I find that most blockages tend to be improvements trying to occur to me.